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The turned-down corners and scribblings in the pages of a well-read text seem as out of place in our age of e-books as the library's card catalog. How can you dog-ear an iPad? But these signs of readerly engagement are proving remarkably resilient on the Internet.

First there is the highbrow. The University of Texas, home to many authors' papers, offers a close, online look at how David Foster Wallace marked up multiple drafts of a chapter of his posthumously published novel, The Pale King (shown below). The Website of the school's cultural archives (hrc.utexas.edu) also shows early marginalia from UT's copy of the Gutenberg Bible.

Margin Notes

App developers are getting in on the act, too: The Waste Land for iPad, a $14 app from Touch Press (touchpress.com), displays Ezra Pound's pointed notations on the manuscript of T.S. Eliot's masterpiece.

Then there is the social—the sharing of margin notes. Apple's iBooks and Amazon's Kindle each can tag passages that catch your eye, or perhaps a turn of phrase that made you chuckle. We were surprised to notice we had left quite a trail through the Neal Stephenson cyber-thriller Reamde—words like gallimaufry and proprioception—and were delighted to see we could Tweet, post to Facebook, text, or e-mail the notes from within the iBooks app. Amazon's Kindle even tracks the most popular highlights across all readers and lets you follow favorite readers. For better or worse, the most commonly highlighted bits are self-help aphorisms.

The famed Strand Book Store in New York offers a combo of highbrow and social: a blog with quirky photos of underlined passages in used books passing through the store (strandbooks.tumblr.com). Consider this annotation in a copy of The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers: "The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." We'll make a mental note of that.